schliz writes: IBM's research director John E Kelly III has delivered an academic lecture in Australia, outlining its 'cognitive computing' aims and efforts as the 70-year 'programmable computing' era comes to a close. He spoke about Watson — the 'glimpse' of cognitive computing that beat humans at Jeopardy! in Feb — and efforts to mimic biological neurons and synapses on 'multi-state' chips. Computers that function like brains, he said, are needed to make sense of exascale data centres of the future.

computing’ to make sense of unprecedented amounts of noisy, unstructured data in various industry sectors today.IBM has set its sights on a new era of ‘cognitive computing’ to make sense of unprecedented amounts of noisy, unstructured data in various industry sectors today.